Liberian leader passively allows assault on free press

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf fails to stop the jailing of her country’s most respected journalist.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf did not intervene to prevent the jailing of her country's most prominent journalist. (Aug. 17, 2013)

By:Rachel Pulfer Published on Fri Sep 20 2013

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Laureate and president of Liberia, arrives in Toronto Friday as part of a three-day official trip to Canada.

Until recently, Ellen, as she’s known in her home country, has been a darling of the international community.

The country’s first democratically elected leader since it emerged from a decade of war, Johnson Sirleaf is internationally acclaimed for stewarding Liberia through a difficult post-conflict transition. Since her election in 2006, the country has had its international debts forgiven, secured significant foreign investment, experienced a relatively peaceful transfer of power and passed West Africa’s first Freedom of Information Act, in 2010. For her leadership, Johnson Sirleaf was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Strange, then, that one of Africa’s most respected journalists, Rodney Sieh, editor of FrontPage Africa, is currently in jail in Liberia. His crime? Faithfully reporting the findings of an official corruption commission initiated by the president herself — part of her administration’s ongoing war on corruption in the world’s most corrupt country.

The newspaper that Sieh heads is well known among international donors and investors as an important pipeline of reliable information from Liberia. Sieh’s personal reputation is one of accuracy and fairness. He is regarded as impervious to bribes.

Back in 2010, FrontPageAfrica published the results of two investigations conducted by the General Auditing Commission, Liberia’s independent corruption watchdog, into the agriculture ministry’s accounts. The investigations found nearly $6 million unaccounted for, and raised questions about the then-agriculture minister, Christopher Toe.

Toe was quietly dismissed. He reacted by suing the newspaper for libel, arguing that because he’d never been prosecuted, he could not be at fault. A civil court ruled in favor of Toe. (In an op-ed published in the New York Times two weeks ago, the jailed editor claims that two jurors admitted they had been paid to rule against the newspaper.)

FrontPage Africa was charged $1.5 million in damages. At 30 times the newspaper’s annual operating budget, it’s a fine no newspaper in Liberia would be able to pay. The court used nonpayment of the fines as grounds to put Sieh in jail and shut down his outlet.

The president has elsewhere indicated she does not always trust the capacity of her courts to reach fair verdicts. But in this case, Johnson Sirleaf’s administration says it is respecting the court’s decision and staying out of the process. Since he was jailed three weeks ago, Liberia’s Nobel laureate president has been deaf to entreaties to release him. Yet in the last analysis, Sieh has been jailed for simply doing his job.

The optics of the situation are terrible. Johnson Sirleaf comes off as more inclined to condone the behaviour of allegedly corrupt ministers than to act on the findings of her own commission. The point of a corruption commission is to ensure donor dollars are used to benefit people who are among the poorest in the world. Yet corruption in Liberia is rampant: this year the country was ranked the most corrupt on the planet, according to Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer.

The international community can and will think twice about investing in a country marching the wrong way up international corruption indexes — one that, rather than take action on corruption, prefers to jail its most internationally respected journalist.

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